It's been a tough two days for Detective Kurt Wallander. Yesterday he watched helplessly as a girl poured a gallon of gasoline over her head and lit a match. Today he's investigating why someone axed a retired Swedish statesman to death and then scalped him. He had hoped to go on vacation in a couple weeks, but that seems unlikely now.

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What's To Like...

This is a police procedural, not a whodunit. Mankell tells the story from both Wallander's and the killer's perspective, so you learn pretty quickly the identity of the latter. Then it's a matter of watching how Wallander works to catch the crafty killer.

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The pacing of the book is good, and there's enough action (mostly killings) throughout to avoid any dull stretches. The story is set in the Swedish summertime, which is a pleasant break from Mankell's earlier drab, wintry novels. There's a helpful map included, although some of the small towns mentioned are omitted. The translator did a good job, other than misspelling "dialled" and hyphenating "no-one".

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The ending is a bit weak, although you could instead call it realistic. The only minus is the killer-goes-after-the-protagonist cliché; but eventually he changes his plan, so I guess that's okay too.

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Kewl New Words...

Only one. Bollard : a thick post on a wharf used for attaching mooring lines.

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Excerpts...

Wallander squatted by the low telephone stand. Next to the phone was the remote control for the TV. Wetterstedt could talk on the phone and watch TV at the same time, he thought. Just like me. We live in a world where people can't bear not to change channel and talk on the phone at the same time. (pg. 67)

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"I wonder what kind of summer it'll be this year," he said.

"My grandmother in Almhult predicts the weather," said Hoglund. "She says it's going to be long, hot and dry."

"Is she usually right?"

"Almost always."

"I think it'll be the opposite. Rainy and cold and crappy."

"Can you predict the weather too?"

"No." (pg. 219)

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"He might have another gun," Svedberg said. "He might try to take you hostage. I don't like this. (...) What does he want?"

"Maybe he's stupid enough to try and make a deal with us. People think Sweden is just like the United States." (pg. 411)

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It's best to be hunting insane killers in the autumn. In the summer give me a good old-fashioned bomber. (pg. 367)

Sidetracked is another solid effort by Henning Mankell. Wallander is still messed up - he gets the hots for a female vicar(it was the outfit), yet has trouble speaking on the phone to his current GF. At least he's no longer burnt out with the job.

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The killer has an amazing set of skills which strains the limits of believability. But it's not impossible, and his rationale for axing/scalping is interesting and plausible. Everything ties together nicely at the end, and once again Mankell adds some social commentary about life in Sweden. All in all, a good police procedural, worthy of the awards it garnered. 8 Stars.

Okay. Start with the Star Wars scenario, but we're going to follow Han Solo & his spaceship instead of Luke & Leia. Now change Han's gender and ditch the Wookie. Limit the traveling world to our Solar System and let our hero have all the sex she wants. That pretty much sets the Take Back Plenty scene.

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Tabitha Jute is an astral barge-driver who's just trying to make ends meet and keep her ship running. When she's offered a tidy sum to take a performing troupe to Triton, it seems like easy money. But there wouldn't be a story if that turned out to be the case, would there?

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What's To Like...

The characters will keep you interested; the storyline will keep you guessing; and the action comes fast enough and often enough to keep you reading. Some of the Good Guys don't make it, and some of the Bad Guys do, and there's a lot of hat-changing along the way. And just who is narrating the tale?

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But it's the detailed descriptions of the various worlds that really sets TBP apart from classic science fiction. I love Andre Norton stories, but goodness, her worlds are paper-thin. If this is what defines the term "space opera"(and there is no consensus on that), then it's a welcome bit of genre evolution.

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OTOH, Take Back Plenty has explicit sex, drugs, the F-word, booze, and a sexual assault or two. If that's what "space opera" means, then it may not be to everyone's taste. Personally, I thought it worked here.

Carnival is Schiaparelli. The canals are thronged with tour buses, the bridges festooned with banners. Balloons escape and fireworks fly. The city seethes in the smoky red light. Though officers of the Eladeldi can be seen patrolling everywhere, pleasure is the only master. Shall we go to the Ruby Pool? To watch the glider duels over the al-Kazara? Or to the old city, where the cavernous ancient silos throb with the latest raga, and the wine of Astarte quickens the veins of the young and beautiful? A thousand smells, of sausages and sweat, phosphorus and patchouli, mingle promiscuously in the arcades. Glasses clash and cutlery clutters in the all-night cantinas where drunken revellers confuse the robot waiters and flee along the colonnades, their bills unpaid, their breath steaming in the thin and wintry air. (pg. 7. Is that a fantastic description, or what?!)

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The Capellans didn't prohibit research, not in so many words; they simply assured humankind that for them with their small brains, the mechanics of hyperspatial foreshortening would be incomprehensible. Those who persisted discovered the drives' disconcerting tendency to implode or deliquesce at the merest touch of a screwdriver. If you did manage to open one, it would turn out to be full of dead leaves. (pg. 62)

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God, you were a mess, Alice. Birds' nests in your aerials, bindweed in your undercarriage. The ground beneath you was sticky and black where all your oil had leaked away. The fog had got at you and rusted your compressor vanes and the airlock seals had all perished.

I fell in love with you the first time I saw you. (pg. 445)

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"Salami minestrone... there's whisky in the jar..." (pg. 83)

Take Back Plenty is a complex story that will keep you on your toes. Yet it's also a fun read. The ending is good, and leaves some loose ends with which to forge a sequel and a threequel. Which do exist if you can find them.

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My main question is why this book, which kicked butt in 1990 for British Sci-Fi awards, is now so little-remembered. There are only three reviews of it at Amazon, and only one at Amazon-UK. Methinks someone needs to get a new publishing company. 8 Stars.

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Trivia Teaser : Tabitha's ship is called the Alice Liddell, and is named for a real, historical person. Who was she? (Answer in the comments)

Saturday, September 18, 2010

In the late 21st century, our timeline learns how to dimension-hop into parallel wotlds. Which is good, because we are suffering from an acute food shortage. So we buy produce and grain in alternate timelines, while selling them technology that is outmoded to us (VCR's, cassette tape decks, etc.), but slightly more advanced than what they have.

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Lawrence Gomes and his teenage son, Paul, run one of the Crosstime buy/sell fronts in an alternate San Francisco, where Germany won WW1 and now rules the world, including the USA. But the Crosstime operation is put in jeopardy - indeed, the whole dimension-hopping process is at risk - when the German occupiers start wondering where this 2-bit family shop is getitng all of its amazing gadgets.

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What's To Like...

The whole idea of parallel worlds (but all at the same point in time) is a typical Turtledove brilliancy. He postulates that a new world is formed at every critical juncture in history. So there are hundreds of alternate universes out there.

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I found the storyline to be believable. There's more action in Curious Notions than there was in the first book, Gunpowder Empire, reviewed here. And although this #2 in a series that now has about 6 books, each one appears to be a stand-alone story.

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Turtledove also made this a G-Rated book. There are no drugs, sex, death, blood, gore, or cussing. The parents of the two teenage protagonists are called "Dad" and "Mom", and although we the readers can see love budding between the kids, there isn't so much as a peck on the cheek. Even the interrogation sessions are ridiculously clean. 'If you don't talk, I'm going to shine this really, really bright light in your eyes.'

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Kewl New Words...

Only one, and it's a bit of an inside joke. Fasarta. Good luck on finding it defined anywhere. It appears to be a nonsense techno-geeky word from Robert Heinlein'sDoor Into Summer. Harry Turtledove reportedly is a big fan of Heinlein's, and this is his way of giving Heinlein a tip of the old hat.

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Excerpts...

People in San Francisco sold anything that moved. If you stepped away from your shadow for a minute, they'd pry it off the sidewalk and try to sell it back to you. (pg. 27)

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"You would do well not to make the Kaiser's government suspect you," the big Feldgendarmie man said. "Next time, you may not be so lucky."

"But I didn't do anything," Lucy's father said.

"If you had not done anything, we would not have arrested you." The German sounded just as sure as if he'd said the sun would come up in the morning. "Just because we cannot prove it does not prove a thing." He also sounded sure he made sense. (pg. 70)

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...this wasn't his San Francisco. For the USA in this alternate, it was a first-rate city. But this USA was a second-rate country, and this San Francisco felt second-rate to him. The town he was used to bounced. This one ... lurched. (pg. 209)

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He was, in a word, bored. In two words, very bored. (pg. 209)

Turtledove wrote Curious Notions to be a YA novel, but I think it should be classified as "Juvenile Fiction". If you know a tweenager who likes Alternate History, this may be a great read for him. But if he's in 8th Grade or higher, he'll likely find this book too dumbed-down and repetitive. Adults should probably avoid this series entirely. 4½ Stars.

Sunday, September 12, 2010

Leigh-Cheri, the exiled and virginal Furstenberg-Barcalona princess, heads to Maui to attend Care Fest, where she hopes to learn all about ecology, meditation, vitamins, and UFO's. Instead, she crosses paths with outlaw-bomber Bernard Mickey Wrangle, who introduces her to Love. But the question is - how do you make Love last?

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What's To Like...

There's humor on every page. The storyline is great, and the ending doesn't disappoint. At its core, Still Life With Woodpecker is a romance, yet both male and female readers will find it appealing. And it does answer the primal question - how to make Love stay.

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The pacing is nice, but Robbins also finds time to go off on a slew of tangents, discussing a wide range of topics such as the difference between an outlaw and a criminal; the lost continent of Mu; how to make bombs from everyday components (Such as a deck of cards. Eat your heart out, McGyver!); an improved plotline to The Grapes of Wrath; the cosmological contrast between the Sun and the Moon; why redheads always seem so weird; and last but not least - the many mystical messages hidden on the cover of a pack of Camel cigarettes.

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Then there are the groan-inducing similes. Some examples : "teardrops bucked out of Leigh-Cheri's eyes like bronco amoebae leaving the chutes in a biology lab rodeo". Or "his lower lip quivered like a snail that had just learned the meaning of escargot." There are dozens more.

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Kewl New Words...

Fimbrillate : having small or tiny hinges. Fecundity : fertility. Renifleur : a person turned on or gratified by certain odors. Cromlech : a prehistoric monument consisting of monoliths encircling a (burial) mound. Sidereal : relating to stars or constellations.

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Excerpts...

His wife, the Queen, once the beauty of seven capitals, was understimulated and overweight. She had attended, in America, so many second-rate society teas, charity fashion shows, and gala this and gala thats, that she'd begun to exude a kind of paté de fois gras gas, and the expulsion of this effluvium propelled her from party to ball as if she were a sausage skin inflated by Wagner. (pg 5-6)

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The Furstenberg-Barcalona homeland was now ruled by a right-wing military junta, supported by the United States government and, of course, the Roman Catholic Church. While the U.S. publicly regretted that the junta permitted so few civil liberties, it was loath to interfere in the internal affairs of a sovereign nation, particularly a nation that could be relied upon as an ally against those left-leaning nations in whose internal affairs the U.S. did regularly interfere. (pg. 7)

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That year, spring came to the Puget Sound country as it frequently does, like a bride's maid climbing a greased pole. After a gradual, precarious ascent, spring, in a triumph of frills and blooms and body heat, would seem ot have finally arrived, only to suddenly slide down into the mud again, leaving winter's wet flag flapping stiffly and singularly at the top of the seasonal staff. Then, girlish bosom heaving, spring would shinny slowly back up the pole. (pg. 148)

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"Outlaws are the can openers in the supermarket of life." (pg. 65)

Tom Robbins' style in Still Life With Woodpecker reminds me a lot of Kurt Vonnegut, with some Terry Pratchett humor added for flavor, and a dash of Charles Bukowski stirred in for spice. For me, this novel was funny, insightful, and interesting; all without taking itself too seriously. Its R-Rated portions may offend some; and others may tire of its tangents. I thought everything came together just fine.

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So if you are bummed because Vonnegut has passed on and there will never be a sequel to The Sirens of Titan, be of good cheer, and give this book a try. 9½ Stars.

A collection of 31 Gaiman-penned short stories, poems and one novella, all of which were published previously. There are aliens and vampires, horror and humor, sock monkeys and Scheherazade, Sherlock Holmes and H.P. Lovecraft. The latter are paired in a single story.

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What's To Like...

A slew of twisty tales from the fertile mind of Neil Gaiman. These aren't Gaiman rejects - four of the stories won Hugo or Locus Awards. Some are light-hearted, others dark. A few bordered on being lewd, which was a new side of Gaiman for me. The introductions to each one, containing background on why he wrote it, are really interesting.

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The Best of the Bunch...

October In The Chair - The 12 months meet to tell themed stories to each other, and tonight, October tells a ghost story. Beautifully done. My Life - A bit of prose written to accompany a picture of a sock monkey. A great example of Gaiman's storytelling skills. Feeders & Eaters - A cannibal romance. The Day The Saucers Came - Just how many things can go wrong on the day the world comes to an end? The Monarch of the Glen - A mini-sequel to American Gods, with Shadow going to Scotland.

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Kewl New Words...

Kedgeree : a dish of rice, hard-boiled eggs, and flaked fish. Guying (vb.) : making fun of. Foeter : a rotting mess (I think). Cachinnation : loud, convulsive laughter. Scatty : rattlebrained. Frottage : rubbing the body against another person for sexual gratification. Bowdlerize : to remove material from a book to make it less vulgar or offensive. Scumble : to soften the colors or outlines of something. Bifurcated : divided into two parts. Tachyon (adj.) : technically, of a hypothetical subatomic particle that travels faster than the speed of light. But here it was "tachyon swans". Tontine : a form of life insurance where, on the death of a participant, his share is destributed to the remaining members of the group. Bothy : a small, primitive hut out in the countryside, left unlocked and available for anyone to use free of charge.

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Excerpts...

"The brides!" came the whisper from beyond the door, and it redoubled and resounded until it seemed to her that the very house itself throbbed and echoed to the beat of those words - two syllables invested with longing, and with love, and with hunger.

Amelia bit her lip. "Aye. The brides. I will bring thee brides. I shall bring brides for all."

... And then one ghost voice hissed, "Yes, and do you think we could get her to throw in a side order of those little bread roll things?" (pg. 59-60)

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"I was never much of a one for cats," he said suddenly. "Not really. I liked dogs. Big, faithful things. You knew where you were with a dog. Not cats. Go off for days on end, you don't see them. When I was a lad, we had a cat, it was called Ginger. There was a family down the street, they had a cat they called Marmalade. Turned out it was the same cat, getting fed by all of us. Well, I mean. Sneaky little buggers. You can't trust them." (pg. 224-225)

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"We knew that it would soon be over, and so we put it all into a poem, to tell the universe who we were, and why we were here, and what we said and did and thought and dreamed and yearned for. We wrapped our dreams in words and patterned the words so that they would live forever, unforgettable. Then we sent the poem as a pattern of flux, to wait in the heart of a star, beaming out its message in pulses and bursts and fuzzes across the electromagnetic spectrum, until the time when, on worlds a thousand sun systems distant, the pattern would be decoded and read, and it would become a poem once again." (pg. 266)

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But where does cantagion end and art begin? (pg. 267)

Like any anthology, Fragile Things has its gems and its paste, and two readers might disagree on which stories are which. Like all short stories, character development and plot depth are sacrificed for the sake of a quick-moving tale. It is no coincidence that the crown jewel here, The Monarch of the Glen, is also the longest story - 54 pages in length.

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Fragile Things won't supplant whatever is currently your favorite Gaiman book, and some of the "rawer" stories and language may not be to everyone's taste. This is definitely not a book for the kiddies. If you've never read a Gaiman book, don't start here. Yet every reader will find some of the stories to be really good, and for those Gaimaniacs among us, this is a worthy collection. 6½ Stars.

Monday, September 6, 2010

The aqueduct-carried water at Misenum has gone bad - it's killing the fish and reeks of sulfur (sulfide, actually). Something has happened upstream and it's up to Attilius, the new aquarius (aqueduct engineer) to find it and fix it. Could it have anything to do with a smoldering Mt. Vesuvius? Probably not, since Pompeii, at the base of the volcano, reports that their water is just fine.

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What's To Like...

Our hero is an engineer, how kewl is that?! The co-star is a historical figure - Pliny the Elder - and to a certain degree, he steals the show. He's been a soldier and a statesman; he's still a scientist an admiral, and a writer. And he's about to lock horns with Mother Nature. Who will win?

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Best of all, Robert Harris gives you a wonderful "feel" for life in the ancient Roman Empire. From the water clocks and water organs to the home life and marketplaces, you really do get a sense of "being there". Even the anachronistic candles can be forgiven.

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You get a storyline with each genre. There is fun with aqueducts for the Historical Fiction. The mystery is what has happened to Exomnius, Attilius' predecessor, who vanished one day without a trace. And the action of course is Vesuvius herself. She's getting ready to blow. Harris deftly ties all these lines together for a coherent story.

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Kewl New Words...

Pergola : an arbor with a framework that supports climbing plants. Hypocaust : an ancient Roman system of central heating. Dyspeptic : morose. Centuriated : pertaining to a Roman practice of dividing up the countryside around a newly established colony into (100) square lots and giving them to the colonists. Demobbed : demobilized. Here : demobbed legionaires. Afflatus : the blowing on someone or something by air or other vapors.

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Excerpts...

Attilius had no time for gods. Boys with wings on their feet, women riding dolphins, graybeards hurling bolts of lightning off the tops of mountains in fits of temper - these were stories for children, not men. He placed faith instead in stones and water, and in the daily miracle that came from mixing two parts of slaked lime to five parts puteolanum - the local red sand - conjuring up a substance that would set underwater with a consistency harder than rock. (pg. 8)

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"Do you see that group of figures, reading in the shade beside the pool? They are philosophers." Torquatus found this very funny. "Some men breed birds as a pastime, others have dogs. The senator keeps philosophers!"

"And what species are these philosophers?"

"Followers of Epicurus. According to Cascus, they hold that man is mortal, the gods are indifferent to his fate, and therefore the only thing to do in life is enjoy oneself."

"I could have told him that for nothing." (pg. 91)

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Poor old Petronius. Too funny and stylish for his own good. In the end, Nero, suspecting his own imperial majesty was being subtly mocked, had eyed him for one last time through his emerald monocle and had ordered him to kill himself. But Petronius had succeeded in turning even that into a joke - opening his veins at the start of a dinner in his house at Cumae, then binding them to eat and to gossip with his friends, then opening them again, then binding them, and so on, as he gradually ebbed away. His last conscious act had been to break a fluorspar wine-dipper worth 300,000 sesterces, which the emperor had been expecting to inherit. That was style. That was taste. (pg 147)

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"May the gods protect us from an honest man." (pg. 209)

Pompeii is not Robert Harris' greatest book. (*) There are problems with each storyline/genre. The characters are 2-dimensional in the Aqueduct plotline. Attilius is pathetically good, and the two bad guys are pathetically evil. This would make it a good YA book, except that there is an obsession with genitalia throughout.

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The mystery of Epomnius is straightforward and dull. The action involving Mt. Vesuvius is great, but only gets going with 80 pages left. There is an exciting ending, but it is much too short. There's even some romance, but it's not well-developed at all.

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Still, as a piece of historical fiction, Pompeii is quite good. I enjoyed the Roman setting, the detailed science of Vesuvius erupting, and the biographical unfolding of Pliny's last days.

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Maybe Robert Harris reached these same conclusions, as presently he is working on Book 3 of a trilogy about Cicero. The first two books - Imperium(2006) and Conspirata(2009) are already out, but they haven't shown up at the used-book store yet. We'll give Pompeii7 Stars - more if you're reading it for the History; less if you're reading it as a Mystery/Thriller.

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(*) : That would be Fatherland, a fantastic Alt-History thriller set in a world where Hitler won WW2. Highly recommended, and reviewed here.

Once he was called Kvothe - meaning The Flame, The Thunder, The Kingkiller, The Arcane, and/or The Bloodless. Now he is simply Kote - a not-so-prosperous innkeeper in a backwater village. But the Chronicler wants to write his story, so that the legendary hero is not forgotten. And therein hangs a tale...

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What's To Like...

The Name of the Wind is the start of an epic. It's like A Song of Ice and Fire, but not as many characters to keep track of. It's like Wheel of Time, but purportedly will only be a trilogy. It's like Lord of the Rings, but there are no dwarves, elves, orcs, ents, or hobbits. But there are some evil critters, and the character of Kvothe is especially well-developed.

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The writing is good, and there's even some poems and songs in it. There is some gentle humor to boot. The magic system is original and interesting. It's less miraculous than Gandalfian wizardry, and therefore more believable.

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There's a lot of chemistry in it, which is always a plus for me. Oh yeah, and it reveals the seven words to make a woman love you. Which we'll kindly put in the comments of this review.

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There are two timelines. The present, with Kote telling his life history to the Chronicler. And the huge biographical backstory of Kvothe, which is only begun here. One of the sub-themes is drug-addiction, which seems to me to be a rare topic in fanstasy novels.

Chronicler's face grew red. "I'd heard that Kvothe was fearless," he said hotly.

The innkeeper shrugged. "Only priests and fools are fearless, and I've never been on the best of terms with God." (pg. 47)

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But for most practical purposes Tarbean had two pieces: Waterside and Hillside. Waterside is where people are poor. That makes them beggars, thieves, and whores. Hillside is where people are rich. That makes them solicitors, politicians, and courtesans. (pg. 160)

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He made a frustrated gesture and sighed. "Have you ever heard the saying: 'One wife, you're happy, two and you're tired-'"

I nodded. "-three and they'll hate each other-"

"-four and they'll hate you," Threpe finished. (pg. 438)

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"You see, women are like fires, like flames. Some women are like candles, bright and friendly. Some are like single sparks or embers, like fireflies for chasing on summer nights. Some are like campfires, all light and heat for a night and willing to be left after. Some women are like hearthfires, not much to look at but underneath they are all warm red coal that burns a long, long time.

"But Dianne... Dianne is like a waterfall of spark pouring off a sharp iron edge that God is holding to the grindstone. You can't help but look, can't help but want it. You might even put your hand to it for a second. But you can't hold it. She'll break your heart..." (pg. 484)

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"Music is a fine thing, but metal lasts." (said to Kvothe)

"Metal rusts. Music lasts forever." (Kvothe's response)

This is a long book, and not a particularly quick read. And for an epic fantasy, there isn't a lot of action, especially during the "University years" in the backstory. TNOTW sets the table for Volumes 2 and 3, which aren't out yet. Will they have more action? Romance? Heartbreak? Fighting? Things that go bump in the night?